TuneWiki was already a favorite music player for Android, mainly for its timed, subtitled lyrics (available translated into more than 40 languages), displayed while keeping the album art on screen and not navigating away from the player controls. The application got a major update today, getting a new interface and enhanced social-networking and music-discovery features.

The interface is now broken into three sections: My Music, Discover, and Connected. My Music is exactly what it sounds like, the music living on your device. Discover houses all the social-networking options. Tapping the Map button, for example, brings up a Song Map to see what people near you or around the world are listening to with TuneWiki. Find someone with similar tastes and you can choose to follow them, making them a Muse. You can also add people from your Facebook and Twitter networks as Muses. Whatever a Muse listens to ends up in your Songbox where you're able to preview and purchase tracks. You can also discover more music from an artist by seeing the songs you own as well as those you don't, with the option to immediately sample, buy, or watch a music video for those songs.

The last section, Connected, is for accessing streaming radio apps such as Shoutcast, music videos, on-demand services like Rhapsody and TuneWiki's Lyric Legend game, which requires you to tap word-filled orbs in time with a song. There's lyric support for streaming audio and video, too.

TuneWiki also announced a beta version of a desktop application that provides synchronized lyrics and can sync music in a desktop library with a mobile device (though I couldn't find the download or information about it on TuneWiki's site).

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Joshua Goldman is a senior editor for CNET Reviews, covering cameras, camcorders, and related accessories. He has been writing about and reviewing consumer technology and software since 2000.
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